Quadtet: Nvidia GeForce 7900 Quad SLI Performance Unveiled. Page 22

When announcing the quad SLI technology at CES 2006, Nvidia Corp. stated that there are some gamers who desire to have extreme performance, quality and exclusivity, but did not begin shipping such products immediately. At CeBIT 2006 the company stated that the systems featuring four GPUs were shipping, even though not all system makers can supply such computers even now. Two announcements and several systems shipped to end-users later, X-bit labs is publishing the performance preview of the technology that made such a loud hype to reveal all the truth about it. Check out how a GeForce 7900 quad SLI performs against rivals in over 10 games.

Performance in Simulators

X3: Reunion

Both: GeForce 7900 quad SLI and Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire support all resolutions including 2560x1600. The ATI platform, however, is substantially faster in all resolutions despite the two GPUs fighting against Nvidia’s four.

Just like the previous game, X3: Reunion simulator is rich in shader effects, and just like in the previous case the ATI Technologies’ solution takes the lead here. We believe it could be an indication that Nvidia’s platform cannot distribute the workload between the four GPUs efficiently enough, while for the dual-GPU ATI platform this is not a problem at all.

This situation is similar to what we have just seen in FSAA 4x + AF 16x mode: the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire manages to leave behind the quad-GPU rival by pretty large margin, even though it uses 14x FSAA, not 16x FSAA.

If you enable SLI AA 32x, you will not be able to play this game even in 1280x1024, not to mention any higher resolutions. Once again the support of this ultra-resource-hungry anti-aliasing mode doesn’t do us any real good.